Howard Zinn On 1619

Neighbors of Zinn Make A Movie

This was a year before my mother's mother's mother's ancesters came to this continent. It is on my mother's mother's father's side I am descended from a murderer's brother. My father's ancesters were probably on this continent in 1919, but in Canada.

"A black American writer, J. Saunders Redding, describes the arrival of a ship in North America in the year 1619:

Sails furled, flag drooping at her rounded stern, she rode the tide in from the sea. She was a strange ship, indeed, by all accounts, a frightening ship, a ship of mystery. Whether she was trader, privateer, or man-of-war no one knows. Through her bulwarks black-mouthed cannon yawned. The flag she flew was Dutch; her crew a motley. Her port of call, an English settlement, Jamestown, in the colony of Virginia. She came, she traded, and shortly afterwards was gone. Probably no ship in modern history has carried a more portentous freight. Her cargo? Twenty slaves.

There is not a country in world history in which racism has been more important, for so long a time, as the United States. And the problem of 'the color line,' as W. E. B. Du Bois put it, is still with us. So it is more than a purely historical question to ask: How does it start? - and an even more urgent question: How might it end? Or, to put it differently: Is it possible for whites and blacks to live together without hatred?

If history can help answer these questions, then the beginnings of slavery in North America - a continent where we can trace the coming of the first whites and the first blacks - might supply at least a few clues." -- Howard Zinn, A People's History of the United States (1980).